The God in the Blood
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash. The ancient Roman Bacchanalia is a time of feasting, of madness, and above all of the crossing of boundaries. COMPLETE.


**Title: **The God in the Blood

**Pairing(s): **Harry/Draco**  
Rating: **R**  
Summary: **The Bacchanalia is a time of madness, of feasting, of orgies—and of crossing boundaries.

**Warnings: **Sex, AU, takes place (partially) in the eighth year. Depicts Roman religion in possibly inaccurate ways.**  
Disclaimer: **All Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling. No copyright infringement is intended.**  
Word Count:** 11,800**  
Beta(s): **Linda and Christine; thank you so much!**  
Author's Notes: **This was written for vaysh11 in the hd_parallel fest on LJ, with a prompt of Harry and Draco having a dream that places them in the Bacchanalia in ancient Rome. I did some research on the festivals, including Am Rhyn's _The Grecian Mysteries and the Roman Bacchanalia_, but added some original details as well. All mistakes are my own. The _gens _referred to in the story are used mostly as another term for noble families.

**The God in the Blood**

Harry shook his head, once, twice, and ended up dropping it back to the floor with a small moan. His hands tingled, and his legs ached as though he had been dancing up and down, although he'd only taken one turn around the room with Hermione because she'd insisted. At that point, his head had already been spinning, and Harry didn't think it was a good idea to encourage his body to join it.

But still. . .

Harry hiccoughed and then grinned at the air. It had been _some _party.

"Mate? Ron's voice was slurred beside him. Harry turned his head and blinked. Ron's head was bobbing, and Harry honestly didn't know if that was because Ron was about to fall asleep or if it came from his own blurred vision. "D'you reckon that we ought to g-get Hermione and g-get out of here?"

Harry looked slowly around the vast room in the dungeons where the eighth-year students, as they called themselves, had decided to attend a Deathday party thrown by what seemed to be most of the ghosts in the castle. (Well, not the Bloody Baron, but Harry was under the impression that the Baron wouldn't know what a party was if it danced through him). The walls had turned, or been turned, grey and shiny, with a motif of skull and crossbones repeated every six inches. In the center was the great black cake that none of the students had touched, on a table strewn with bottles and goblets from the ghostwine that they _had _drunk more than enough of. Harry couldn't see any ghosts right now.

But he could see plenty of other bodies, and, in a way, he could understand Ron's concern. Slytherins sprawled on the floor among the members of other Houses, and although they hadn't done anything so far this year, maybe they were shamming drunk right now so they could do something sneaky later.

Harry shut his eyes. Trying to force his brain to do anything, to think about anything or to run in circles, was physically painful. He hissed as he tried to get his feet beneath him and wound up sliding down the wall again. He crept away from it, but then had to slump back, panting, as the world danced wildly.

"Could we get up the stairs without falling over?" he asked seriously, turning his head and squinting one eye in the hopes that that would bring Ron back into focus.

Ron considered the question, tipping his head back and forth in what seemed like deep thought. Then he sighed and shook his head. "Reckon we'd just d-drop Hermione and break our heads open," he said. "She wouldn't like that. M-might say we're st-stupi-stoop—" He frowned up at the ceiling. "Dumber than ever."

"Yeah." Harry closed his eyes. "Just sleep it off here? Everyone else is." And the war was over, so they didn't have to worry about Voldemort.

Sometimes, like now, that thought still sent a thrill of pure pleasure through Harry, and he wondered for a moment if he would wake up and smile. But no, that would take too much energy.

"Right, mate," Ron said, and Harry heard the heavy sound of him falling to the floor a moment later. He seemed to have found a bare spot by Hermione.

Harry crawled a few feet further, out of a blurred realization that he didn't want to wake up next to his best friends and feed the rumor mill any further. The _Daily Prophet, _deprived of stories about the war and tired of rehearsing the ones about the cleanup and Harry's glory, was currently trying frantically to discover who his "secret paramour" was.

_Got to find someone they can't link me with._

He continued crawling, while the floor beneath him rippled in interesting ways, and then he saw a flash of pale hair. Harry laughed under his breath and crashed down beside Malfoy. He was dead to the world, his head flung back and his lips parted around a series of lusty snores that Harry would have to remember to mention to him later, so he could embarrass the git.

_No one will ever think I could date a bloke, let alone one like him!_ Harry decided in triumph, and closed his eyes.

The world stopped spinning, and the cold sensation that Harry had sometimes felt in his gut, off and on, since he drank the ghostwine stopped. But now there was a sensation of warmth. Harry frowned. He was starting to think that he shouldn't have drunk so much after all. Was the world ever going to go back to normal so that he could go to _sleep?_

But then it turned out that the warm sensation led him into sleep, and into dreams, so Harry decided that that wasn't so bad after all. The last thing he heard before he ceased to hear anything were Malfoy's snores, beating like muffled drums against his ears.

* * *

Draco could hear the drums.

He crouched in the thick bushes that covered this side of the hill and told himself, again and again, to be _quiet_. He knew that ordinary people couldn't hear heartbeats and breathing unless they were really loud, but the women down the hill were no ordinary people, and this was no ordinary night.

He really shouldn't be here at all. The rites around Rome had been opened to men about ten years ago, but that wasn't the same as saying that _all _men were welcome at them. And Marcus Aemilius Draco, son of Lucius Aemillius Argentus, was not the sort of person whose hiding in bushes would be tolerated, either by the women dancing for the god or his father.

Draco didn't care about breaking the rules. He did care about not getting caught, though, and so he crouched in utter silence, staring, fascinated, and kept on trying not to breathe too loudly.

The women before him included many whom he had known all his life, at least as girls soberly walking after their mothers to the fountains or passing under the care of slaves once they were grown and married to great men. And there were the mothers of his friends, the sisters of them, their wives, their eyes grown hot and bright and their arms flashing as they wheeled about in the midst of the clear ground, dancing with as much as over and through the fires they had lit. Draco could hardly bear the wild music, the clash and the skirl of drums and flutes and pipes so high that he thought his ears would bleed. He flinched inwardly at the skins they were clad in, bear and wolf and leopard, and wondered where they'd got them. These rites were starting to look as violent and debased as his father had always said they were.

But that wasn't the point. The point was that someone had tried to keep Draco out, and no one did that, now that he was eighteen and a man grown (even though both his father and mother, who had only the one child, tried to pretend that they didn't see it). He would go wherever he chose to go and look at whatever he chose.

But he did wonder if there was going to be any more to see, other than the dancing and the drinking and the shouting and the singing. The wildest tales whispered around the city of the rites of Bacchus were much more attractive than the reality. Draco leaned his head on his arm and wondered if something would happen soon.

What happened was someone tripping over him.

* * *

Harry had come to look at the rites because he was so _bored_.

There seemed to be little to do nowadays, when his father couldn't pretend anymore that his strange foreign wife, who had died six years before, wasn't showing up in his son. Gaius Clodia Corvinus had regretted his marriage immediately after he made it, and Harry didn't think he would have made it at all if not for his mother's green eyes, which Corvinus said more than once had enchanted him. In fact, he more than half believed her to have been a witch, and he called her Medea so often that Harry never had learned her true name.

Harry was Harry because—well, because his mother had said that name in her own language when she saw him after he was born, and although neither she nor anyone else could ever tell him what it meant, Harry liked it better than any of the names his father had given him. He knew he was strange, with his dark hair that curled wildly and those green eyes and the way that sometimes strange things happened around him, like the kitten who had appeared in his arms from the other side of a square where the dogs were chasing it. And there was the scar on his forehead where one of his mother's women had dropped him when he was a baby, and his head had only bled a little instead of cracking like it should have. It was shaped like a lightning bolt. No one else had a scar like that.

He didn't see any reason to pretend that he was a normal Roman boy, with lineage on both sides that went back before the founding of the city. He wasn't.

Except. . .

Well, now he was eighteen, and his father couldn't send him to school anymore, and he didn't have a hope of becoming a powerful man or even a soldier because he was too _peculiar, _bad luck or cursed by the gods. And so Harry wasted his days chasing and being chased by younger boys and watching soldiers and animals and dreaming of doing something else, something great.

Watching the Bacchanalia wasn't something he had thought to do before. He hoped it would at least be surprising, make the blood run faster in his veins or his heartbeat speed up to the point that little red spots danced on the edges of his vision, the way that he sometimes felt when he was dangling off the high side of a building for the sheer rush of being alive.

But he didn't react the way he should have to the sight of mostly-naked women. The most interesting thing had been when they danced with snakes in their hair and their hands. Harry shook his head. Just more proof that there was something wrong with him.

Then he tripped over another boy lying flat on the ground, and rolled swiftly, ready to get back on his feet. He'd been teased and bullied more than often enough to know what would happen next.

For some reason, though, the other boy didn't immediately spring up and start yelling at him. He stayed where he was and hissed instead. Harry frowned, wondering if he had knocked the wind out of the stranger.

Then the boy said, in a voice that revealed he came from one of the patrician families, "Get _down_! Are you mad?" and pulled him flat.

_Oh, right, _Harry thought, his heartbeat already slowing from the excitement he had thought this might potentially represent. _The women. They might tear us apart as if we were bulls or something. _He'd heard stories like that about the women who danced for Bacchus.

But he didn't believe it actually happened, which meant no excitement and nothing to do here, either. Harry laid his head along his arm, the way the boy had been doing before, and sighed.

"Not so loud," the other boy said, in a voice much louder than Harry's sigh, and kept his eyes on the dancers.

Harry glanced sideways at him. He snorted a moment later. There was that pale hair that marked the gens Aemilia, or at least the current generation of them. It was Harry's private opinion that they were more foreign-looking than he was, but probably because the current paterfamilias was so powerful, no one said that to their faces. And Corvinus had told Harry not to say it, either.

So Harry didn't. But he was bored, and he thought he might want to try starting a conversation with this boy. At the moment, the boy was waiting with bated breath for the women to do something new, and it was Harry's opinion that that wouldn't happen.

"Why did you decide to come here?" he asked.

The boy turned his head and gave him an intense look. He had eyes that were an odd color, Harry thought, like river water. He bent closer, and Harry reared back. That made something crunch, and the boy hissed like he'd been wounded and shook his head.

"Why does anyone want to see a naked woman?" he breathed, his eyes locked on the one who was writhing around right now. Harry gave her an uninterested glance. He reckoned she wasn't too bad, with long dark brown hair and skin that looked as though someone had spent a lot of time protecting it from the sun, but he hadn't ever paid much attention to girls. Corvinus had told him over and over that he couldn't hope to make a profitable marriage with his odd looks, which Harry knew meant _any _marriage. Corvinus wouldn't let Harry marry beneath him, either.

Trying to keep track of his father's contradictory ideas made Harry dizzy, and he looked again at the Aemilia boy beside him. He had on a tunic that looked so dirty Harry thought he must have been hiding out here most of the afternoon. If there were colors on it, or stripes, Harry couldn't see them in the dim light of the fire. But he didn't think there were. This boy was destined for greater things than Harry, of course, but he wasn't actually anything right now.

"What's your name?" he whispered.

* * *

Draco half-closed his eyes. He didn't want to answer the strange boy, and he _especially _didn't want him to go on whispering this way, a way that might get them caught if they weren't careful.

On the other hand, as reluctant as Draco was to admit this, the dance was a disappointment. There was nothing of the wildness Draco had expected, and nothing of the presence of the god. Perhaps he had come and gone before Draco arrived, or perhaps he simply refused to show himself in front of male eyes, despite the new custom saying that men could attend the rites.

And this boy was one Draco had seen about before, but not one he actually knew. He turned over and regarded him with more curiosity than he had allowed himself to show so far. As long as he could teach the boy to whisper properly, this might be the beginning of something that would interest him.

"Marcus Aemilius Draco," he said formally, and was gratified to see the other boy's eyes widen. A flash of firelight traveled across their faces, and Draco blinked. Intense, cat-like green eyes. He knew that he had seen those before, on a troop of captured slaves that the soldiers had marched through the forum, but he hadn't thought to see them on a freeborn citizen. Subtly, he checked the boy's tunic, but relaxed with relief when he realized that, yes, this wasn't a slave. He would have lowered himself if he had talked to one like an equal, so much that he would have had to admit it to his father, and Lucius's punishments were legendary.

"Um, call me Harry," the boy said. "Everyone does."

Draco narrowed his eyes. "Your gens," he hissed, with only a sideways glance to make sure that the women weren't listening. But they seemed caught up in the way that one of them was holding a snake, its lustrous white coils looping around her arms. Several of them danced in place and applauded, while the drums grew steadily more insistent. Draco snorted. He was starting to wonder why anyone would _want _to attend the rites. You could dance for free at any time you wanted, and finding slaves to beat the drums wasn't hard.

"Clodia," said the boy. Draco expected to hear stung pride in his voice—that was the way Draco would feel if anyone had mistaken him for anything but his father's son—but there was only resignation here. "My father is Corvinus. You probably heard about his marriage."

Draco frowned. "Vaguely." His father _had _said something about it, but years ago, and Draco had been more interested in whether he was going to be permitted to visit the sea that summer than old gossip. "I tend not to listen to rumors," he added loftily.

The loftiness was destroyed when Harry—what a strange name, with an air as though someone was licking his lips when he said it, Draco thought—collapsed onto his side and tried unsuccessfully to muffle his giggles in the leaves. Draco straightened his head and narrowed his eyes. "You find something funny?" he asked coldly.

"Never listen to rumors," Harry said, and looked up, lines of laughter carving his face into a mask of such beauty that Draco blinked and caught his breath. There might be more here than he had thought after all, at least for him, he decided. "My father says _yours _is the biggest gossip in the city."

Draco snarled automatically, but he had to admit that he could hardly react to that as though it was untrue. "Mere rumors in themselves," he said, and then turned the conversation back on the boy. "I know that your father once did something dishonorable to mine."

"Did he?" The infuriating Harry had squirmed forwards so that he was watching the women through the gaps in the bushes, exactly as if Draco were no longer worthy to claim his attention. Draco leaned in, and at least Harry turned his head and frowned, although he no longer looked as interested as Draco had hoped.

"You don't seem surprised," Draco said. "Or outraged," he added, before he could think better of it. "Do you care so little for the honor of your gens?"

Harry's mouth twisted. Draco wondered whether he was finally learning to read emotions as well as his father said he should, or whether Harry just had a very expressive face. Probably some combination of the two, he decided. "My father has made it clear that that honor isn't really mine to care for," Harry muttered. "He probably would have married and had other sons, but he's so busy he never had time for a wife."

Draco shook his head. "Did he marry a slave?"

"A foreigner," Harry said. "A sorceress of some kind, to hear him talk. And he thinks I inherited her magic," he added, sweeping his hair aside so that Draco could see a scar on his forehead. "This is from a fall that should have killed me. My father probably wishes it did. But I survived with just a scratch."

Draco felt envy stir in him. He didn't have any scars; his mother had always been ridiculously tender of him. If he had been allowed to be a soldier, he thought, instead of continually being told that he had to be a senator instead and not risk his life, he would have scars like that, marks of bravery that would make people see him as more than just the son of his father.

"I'd give anything for your life," he said rashly. At the moment, it was true, and he highly doubted that this boy would dare to approach him _outside _the moment.

* * *

Harry's eyes narrowed, and he couldn't keep himself from snorting aloud. Then he checked to be sure that the women still hadn't heard them, but they were bending down and writhing beneath cut branches covered with ivy. He doubted it, so he turned back to Draco—if he could call him that—a bit more reassured.

"You wouldn't want it," he said. "Being hated by your father, told that you'll never marry, that you're too strange, that you're unlucky? You've probably been told you'll do great things all your life. You couldn't put up with suddenly being pushed to the outside."

Draco squirmed closer. Harry told his increased heartbeat that it was ridiculous to react that way and that Draco was only trying to make sure they could hear each other over the persistent sound of the drums.

"I want adventure," Draco whispered. "I wish I'd been born in the time of the Founder and watched him go to heaven. I wish I'd sailed across the seas with Aeneas to reach Italy when it was still a wild country and no one here knew the history of Troy. I wish I'd loved someone like he loved Dido. My life is pleasant, rich, and _boring. _My father thinks I should follow one course and one course only, and he won't let me do anything else. You have more freedom."

Harry blinked. That was literally not a thought he'd ever had before, that his way of life might give someone envy.

Then he thought again of the looks fixed on him when that kitten appeared in his arms, and shook his head. "You'd enjoy it for a little while," he said. "Of course you would. But in the end, you wouldn't be able to advance and do what you want. The only reason _I _can come and go and no one cares is that they're indifferent to me. You couldn't make them pay attention to you if you had eyes like mine." _Or magic like mine, _he wanted to add, but he didn't know if his mother had really been a sorceress or if his father was making that up.

Draco leaned back on one arm and studied him in interest. Then he shook his head and started to say something else.

Harry never found out what it was, because at that moment the drums changed tone, becoming so fast and frenzied that he couldn't believe human beings were beating them. He turned around to make sure that something hadn't happened.

The women were whirling around the fire, laughing. They had cast the animal skins from them, and their bodies were flushed impossible colors in the dim light. Harry's eyes widened as he watched their eyes shine and their hair stream, just the way it did in the legends.

"The god is here," he whispered.

"What?" Draco's voice was sharp, but seemed to come from underwater. Harry found himself moving closer to the thin boundary of bushes that separated him from the women. Separated _them _from the women, he remembered, as Draco's arm fell across his back and halted his progress.

"Not really," Draco said, which proved that he must have heard Harry the first time. Harry shook his head, not wanting to be awakened from the trance that he thought was falling over as him as he watched the women dance for Bacchus. "He wouldn't come—he doesn't come to places like this."

"What, outdoors?" Harry asked. His voice was weak, and he didn't care. He was busy watching the women arch their backs and bring their hands down to the earth, in positions that should have been impossible for anyone who wasn't a trained tumbler. Some of them jumped in the air, clasped their legs together as if they were sitting on an invisible wall, and came down again. Their laughter was wild, the baying of hounds, the barking of crows.

"To places where there's _civilization_," Draco said, and his voice was stressed and he was backing away from the bushes now, as though he thought putting distance between him and the women would lessen the god's presence. Harry shivered with excitement, though, and pressed closer.

He was thinking that this was one place where no one would despise him for his outsider status. A place where he could find magic like the kind that he might or might not have, like the kind that his mother might or might not have practiced. Corvinus had made a sneering reference, once, to how she had followed strange ways and mysteries. Mysteries like these?

"Harry! Are you _insane_?"

"I think that isn't the first time you've asked me that," Harry said, and he stood there for a moment, giving himself the courage of the drums, the beat and the wildness and the blood filling him until he felt his feet twitch. He knew now why the women were dancing like they were. It was the only way to deal with what the drums made them feel.

He sprang forwards, out among them, whirling with his wild hair flying behind him, his eyes sparking, his voice crying out.

His name meant something unknown in a strange language. His father hated him. He didn't belong in the world of people like Draco, or his family, the strange, beautiful, hard-as-marble world that his father had tried to introduce him to, had insisted that any son of his be born as part of.

Perhaps he would find a place to belong here.

* * *

Draco remained frozen for exactly as long as it took him to realize that, once again, as seemed inevitable from the stories of his life, this strange boy who called himself Harry was having an adventure, while Draco lingered behind in safety and embarrassment.

His father would have sneered at him and said it was more complicated than that, that Draco didn't see the price this Harry was paying for his freedom. Harry had hinted at the same thing when he talked about how he was an outcast.

But Draco didn't want to think about that right now. He even wanted to forget about the fact that the women could tear him to pieces if they saw him. He wanted to forget about everything but the slim, dancing, leaping shape in front of him that pirouetted as though he was a trained dancer, as though he had been born to do this.

And as Draco leaped over the bushes, it occurred to him that the women hadn't yet torn Harry to pieces.

_Yet._

Draco landed with a huff and a jar that seemed to go up through his bones and make them vibrate. He found the dancers wreathing around him, writhing, their arms spreading so that he couldn't escape an embrace or two. He looked for the snakes that they had been holding a few minutes ago, not wanting to crush them or get bitten, but he couldn't see them.

And the faces of the women about him had begun to transform. Draco knew that they had only been wearing animal skins, not that they had become animals themselves, but the faces that grinned or panted at him were the faces of wolf and panther, bear and bull. He remembered a tale he had heard whispered-by slave women whom his father had sold when Draco innocently repeated their words-that the god's presence was announced by the animals that appeared around him, gamboling young and innocent, so enthralled with him that they didn't tear at each other in the normal way of hunter and prey.

Humans might not be so kind.

But for the moment, Draco whirled and stamped among these human-seeming animals, these animal-seeming humans, content and ecstatic at the same time, and then the moment ended and he saw Harry.

He was dancing through a stream of women who had formed at one end of the dance, continually circulating through each other's raised arms, arch melting into circle, shapes coiling back on themselves like the abandoned snakes. Harry danced, too, melting through the arches and then out the other side, daring them to touch him, but always returning, so that Draco knew one of the women catching and holding him was only a matter of time.

Draco didn't know why that thought made his heart quicken its beat or why he immediately hurried over to that part of the clearing. It wasn't as though anything worse would happen to Harry (probably) than was already happening to him. It wasn't as though this boy was part of his gens or even one of his slaves, whom Draco would feel bound to by ties of blood or gratitude. And Draco hadn't awakened today with a prayer on his lips for one of the gods to send him such a charge so that he might ask for a favor in return.

But he hurried anyway, and his relief when he finally seized Harry in his arms was indescribable.

Harry turned around, saw it was him, and gave him a contemptuous flick of his head before he seemed to dismiss Draco. He had his eyes fixed on a woman across the clearing, Draco saw, one of those who had the face of a leopard at the moment. She was footing it lightly, her long hair tossing around her, one lithe arm waving a thyrsus as though she was about to bring it down across someone's back.

Draco tightened his grip when Harry tried to slip free. "I know her," he muttered. "She's from a branch of your family. You don't want to sleep with someone you're related to, do you?" He felt curiously light-headed. He hadn't paid attention to the drums in several minutes, but they seemed to have worked their way into his blood anyway. He bowed his head and nuzzled the nape of Harry's neck.

Harry froze and squeaked under his breath. Then he said, "You need to let me go, Aemilius. I'm not going to tell you why, but you need to."

Draco laughed. He could hear his own laughter, more distant and louder than it should have been, like the roar of the legendary creature that his use-name came from. "Give me a good reason, and perhaps I will."

* * *

Harry hadn't pictured having to deal with a situation like this when he jumped the bushes. His old life, his life without the god, was the one with all the constraints, the one where people held him back and told him that he couldn't do things because they were stupid or he was foreign or they saw the shadow of his mother looking out of his eyes. This was supposed to be the part where he was _free_.

And for a few glorious moments, he had been.

But now Aemilius was holding him back and acting exactly like one of the rich and powerful people that his father said Harry could never be, trying to take over everyone else's lives and make them miserable. Harry leaned down, bit the corner of Aemilius's hand, and ran towards the woman he had picked out when the boy let him go, blaspheming.

Harry didn't think that was a smart idea when Bacchus was all around them, practically breathing wine-laden breath into their faces, but presumably fear of the gods was something that no patrician family really felt. They had everything in their lives already, what did they want that a god could give?

The woman bowed to him and spread her hands wide in greeting. Harry did the same thing, because it seemed appropriate, and then began to circle to the left. The woman copied him by circling to the right, her head tilted back and her breasts offered to him on top of a wide garland of flowers.

Harry wondered where that had come from. He hadn't thought that any of the women he saw in the clearing carried such flowers with them.

Something sparkled in the air above his head, and then Harry was covered in fold after fold of brilliant red anemones. He supposed they were a gift of the god. He laughed, and the woman laughed with him, and they danced towards a corner of the clearing, into shadows that made Harry's heart beat faster. He hadn't ever fucked someone, and he wondered if it would hurt.

Strong arms seized him around the waist, and someone bent his head back and kissed him with a clumsy, wet mouth. Harry spluttered and wriggled, and then ended up biting the chin of the person hiding him. In the end, the person let him go with a laugh, and Harry whirled around to face the Aemilius boy.

The woman had danced away to engage with someone else when he checked on her. Harry narrowed his eyes and turned back to Draco. He should probably call him that, he decided. Thinking of him by the name of his gens was giving him too much credit. He didn't act like the other people Harry had met who bore that name. He was too impulsive, and he wanted to get his greedy hands all over Harry's body.

Harry wished he understood why. He could have used some of that quality in his daily interactions with other people.

But the whole _point _was that this wasn't his daily life, and he had a right to be suspicious and touchy. He folded his arms and scowled at Draco. "Why are you keeping after me?" he asked in irritation. "It's not as though you'll get in trouble if something happens to me. I'm not your younger brother, or your slave." He had already caught the eye of another woman he thought he wanted to try. She had long white hair that looked as though it had been dyed, and she swayed in step with a dance that was a pace behind the drums.

"I want you," Draco said.

Harry swung around and gaped at him. Oh, he _knew _that sometimes the boys fucked each other; he wasn't such an innocent as all that. But he was no one, he was short and scrawny instead of lithe and pretty like the boys that seemed to be most favored, and he was freeborn, not a slave that someone could just command. The combination made for uneasiness with the boys who might have favored him or forced him otherwise.

"You _what_," he said, and then shook his head. Draco had to be joking. Or the madness of the night was in his blood. "Never mind." He stood on his tiptoes so that he could see where the white-haired woman had gone.

"I want what you represent," Draco told his back. "Your life, and your wildness, and your strangeness. This is the only way that I can have it, and it's just for one night. You said the god was here. Maybe he put these words into my mouth, these images into my head. It would make sense, because I burn to have you, but I don't know _why_. Come here."

"A fine speech," Harry said, glancing at him and trying not to show just how affected he _had _been. Those words matched with the ones that Draco had spoken before, and for the first time, they had managed to make Harry see a way that someone outside the normal system of everything might be desirable. "But I don't want you."

"Really." A gleam that was pure Aemilius grew in Draco's eyes, and he stepped back and spread his arms so that Harry could look at him. He didn't need to speak any words. The shine in his face spoke for him.

Harry looked at Draco, and tried to imagine an act he knew nothing about. What was he supposed to be looking for? He knew what was desirable in women: long hair, a graceful step, a soft body that would provide warmth and comfort and bear heirs. He couldn't ever have it, thanks to his heritage, but his father had still insisted that he read some of the right treatises and poems during his scattered education. Harry knew how to think about women.

He didn't know how to think about the slender body in front of him, the way that Draco swayed slightly on his feet even when he was supposed to be standing still, as if he couldn't keep from hearing the music of the drums. He didn't know what to do with the brightness of those eyes, the arrogant confidence in them. The only person Harry had ever seen look like that was his father. It was the expression of someone who had never been denied anything he wanted.

_Why shouldn't I be the first? _

But it was hard to keep up the disdainful attitude when someone who normally wore that expression was looking at _you_. Draco let his eyes roam over Harry, and Harry flushed from the force of them, but he also had the impulse to meet him in challenge, to dance up to him and look at him, boldly, the same way, to-

He still didn't know. Exactly how did you decide another boy was handsome? How did you fuck him?

Then he flushed, because he knew the answer to that _last _one, and he was tired of standing here and feeling awkward and childish.

So he stepped up to Draco, grabbed the front of his tunic, and pulled him into a kiss that was probably clumsy and wrong, but was at least better than standing there, gaping and staring, and acting like an idiot.

* * *

Draco opened his mouth in surprise. He had thought that he would have to do more coaxing before Harry gave in, even though it was so obviously what he wanted to do. Harry wasn't patrician, Draco could see, no matter what his gens name was, because he hadn't been trained in the ways of polite refusal _or _sweet compliance. He just stood there, stubborn, and waited for every invitation to turn to water and roll off him.

But this was better, with the hot aggressive tongue curling around Draco's and the hands finding their places on his hips.

Not that Draco intended to simply stand there. He curled his tongue back and grabbed Harry's neck, shoving him down towards the earth. They might as well be comfortable while they lay on top of each other.

Harry broke away, his eyes flaring hot, and Draco had to swallow hard to prevent the cry of denial that would otherwise come out of him. What the fuck was Harry doing _now_? Draco didn't want to keep up this teasing, this dance. He wanted Harry, yes, but there was also the temptation to go and sate himself with one of the women who were dancing more and more wildly now, their animal skins trailing behind them, or their hair their only garment.

"The god is here," Harry said, the way he had before, voice low and commanding. Draco felt his teeth, his hair, his prick all stand on edge. "I think we should prove that we can honor him as well as anyone else joining in the rites."

"What do you mean?" Draco demanded. Subtly, he tried to edge closer to Harry, but Harry saw it and sprang away with a triumphant smile, shaking his head.

"I mean," Harry said, "that Bacchus is the god of wine, and merriment, and the wild beasts. Prove that you want me in the hunt." And he wheeled away from the clearing and sprinted into the woods as though he knew where he was going, as though he went on such runs and called people after him all the time. The only sound left behind him was his fading, teasing laughter.

Draco sprang into motion at once, without considering how he was going to get back, without considering what such fleetness implied about Harry's sexual experience. The blood in him suddenly surged up and down like fire. He could feel the god's whip hand in his brain. Laughter echoed in his ears, and it could have been the dancers' or Harry's or his own. Or the god's.

It no longer mattered. What mattered was _catching _the bastard.

The laughter trailed in and out among the trees ahead of him. Draco leaped over sticks and over roots, ducked beneath branches, and sped up as though he was running on one of the flat grounds which the soldiers kept to practice with their horses. He didn't know how he could run so well in woods so thick. He no longer cared. He only knew that he wanted to snatch Harry and hold him down, panting, against him, neck arched in surrender, eyes half-closing as he gave in.

He would _have _to give in. Draco could already feel the greed of his mouth and hands. He would teach Harry what the moment was like, what it meant to defy someone like him.

And then those emotions began to shift and melt, becoming red and black, like the shadows of the forest and the pounding of blood in his ears. Draco no longer wanted to teach Harry a lesson because he was caught up in wonder that Harry _dared _to defy the will of someone from the gens Aemilius. Instead, he wanted to catch Harry because he was wild, and running, and Draco was a hunter at the moment. He wanted to hold Harry down because he wanted to feel what that strange, slim body would be like, writhing beneath him. He leaped like a deer, and he would tear apart like a wolf.

If he could catch Harry, who was running as if inspired by the same breathless speed that Draco had swallowed.

A deer started ahead of them. Draco ran, and then he was running _beside _the deer, a stag, who gave him a single terrified look from deep dark eyes and hooked his head sideways as though he would catch Draco on the edges of his antlers. Draco laughed and raised his arm, and the antlers passed beneath and above it, catching him enough to sling him off his feet for a dizzying moment.

Then he was back on the ground, and the stag was springing down a ravine that opened up in front of them, lost to sight among jagged rocks. Draco barely remembered tensing his legs, but he had leaped the ravine, and he knew from the echoing laughter and fleeing shadow ahead of him that Harry had, too.

Shrieks and screams rose from the sides. Draco knew without words that the maenads, the Bacchantes, were hunting, and that they would tear apart anyone they could catch, which could include him and Harry, if they were unlucky enough.

That only added to the excitement.

Shrieking himself, Draco bowed his head and hurtled along, his feet winged like Mercury's, his hair streaming behind him as if it were as long as a woman's. Another ravine, and it was gone, beneath and behind him. A slope, and he leaped up it as if he had become the deer. But there was still a shadow ahead of him, and there was still the wolf's hunger burning beneath his heart.

He reached out his arms at the right moment to seize a handful of twilight, and then someone was within them, and Draco shut his eyes and bowed his head, more than willing to close mouths with his prize.

They dropped to the earth, and wrestled there. Harry was all claws and writhing limbs and brilliant eyes, but Draco wasn't about to give up the challenge. He had drunk the wine of freedom for the first time in his life, and he wanted to go on drinking it.

* * *

Harry had never known a chase like that.

Yes, boys had chased him before, because they had seen his "magic" or wanted to throw rocks at him or wanted to mock him for his features. And Harry could run faster than most of them, panting around the outside of the squares until they gave up in disgust and went back home. But those chases always left him more than half-angry, no matter how proud he was of his speed. He was still running away, not fighting back, and no matter how sensible that was when there were many of them and only one of him, it made him feel cowardly, too.

But _this _time...

He knew that Aemilius was following him because he wanted to. He knew that he was experiencing the same ecstasy Harry did right now, the blood filling him like fire, the heartbeat filling him like his own private drum.

Harry saw a lynx pacing alongside him, watching him with wise golden eyes. Then a wolf was there, its mouth parted wide around the long panting tongue that dripped glowing saliva to the ground. And a barely-there shadow, long and slender on four paws, was a panther. Harry would have held his breath in fear had he apprehended any danger from them. He wasn't a trained hunter, and he didn't have _real _magic, to make them bow in front of him.

But at this point in time, they were all the god's, and Harry waved and laughed at them, and did somersaults with his heels over his head, and they stared at him or bowed their heads to him and then faded back into the forest, only to be replaced by another denizen before long.

Wild goats and wild deer leaped around him. Donkeys brayed. Harry could feel the anemones coming to life around his neck, curling their leaves into his skin and filling his ears with the grunting of wild boars.

He leaped, and he laughed, and for the first time in his life, he could feel desire lapping up and down his back like warm oil that someone had poured over him. For the first time in his life, he knew what it was like to feel real, heavy, solid, _wanted_.

Over streams, under trees that had grown there for hundreds of years, over leaves that crowded the ground so thickly that Harry felt momentarily bad for disturbing them, and under hills that threw endless shadows, he ran, and Draco was behind him.

Harry whirled around at last, and Draco was there, bending over him, eyes like moonlight, like wilderness. Harry threw his head back fearlessly into the kiss, not minding even when Draco pinned him to the ground. He knew that he could get free when he wanted to, and to feel hands trembling as they slid along his skin, not with rage but because of _lust_, was enough to keep him where he was for right now.

Draco kissed like he fought, as brutal and uncoordinated as though he was someone who had grown up in the woods, or running wild in the streets like Harry, or at least not in the sophisticated house, filled with quietly murmuring, obedient slaves, that Harry knew he must have. His eyes were so wide that Harry reached up to touch them in wonder, only for Draco to catch and bite his fingers. His legs jerked up and down, one moment spreading as if they would embrace Harry's hips, the next trying to lock onto Harry's and drag them back onto the ground.

It was all new. It was all a dazzle. And Harry thought he understood, for a single moment, Draco's desire for an adventure.

"Here, let me-" Draco said. There was oil on his fingers.

Harry blinked, and then understood what Draco wanted to do when he dragged Harry's tunic up and open and kicked his legs out to the side. He was reaching down for his anus, and Harry gasped in surprise as Draco pushed more folds of cloth out of the way and then stroked the delicate skin there.

But wait, Harry thought, a sharp thought cutting through his daze. Hadn't one of the boys who sometimes hunted him said that it was all right for you to fuck someone, but not for you to be fucked? Because then you were a woman.

He rolled over again, struggling at one and the same moment to pin Draco down and to make him let go, to spread his legs and not spread them, caught in cloth, tangled in conflicting feelings until his head ached with them.

Draco bit the back of his neck, and the overflowing, overlapping feelings of pain, need, and a bit of pleasure assaulted him like the fingers pressing into his hips, like the fingers trying to find his bottom. Harry bowed his head and shook it at the same moment.

"Not like this," he said.

"Only like this," Draco said, and bit him gently on the back of his neck again. Harry knew that the bite wasn't firm enough to hold him there unless he let it. He didn't know if he should let it or not. He wanted to, but the thought of what people would say afterwards, of what would happen because of this...

Then Harry blinked. Who was going to know? They were out in the middle of the woods, and the god was with them, would be on them again in a moment if Harry listened to the blood-beat of his ears and his heart. He could go back into the city again, and no one would ever know who had fucked him.

Except Draco.

"Swear," he gasped out, because Draco had finally pulled Harry's tunic up enough to get his fingers where he wanted them to go. They dug deep, and Harry squirmed and howled. But he managed to get the howl to form into words. He was proud of himself. "Swear that you won't tell anyone about this."

Draco laughed into the back of his neck. "Who would I tell? Who would believe me? Do you think I _want_-"

And then his voice faltered and fell silent. Harry was glad. He knew what Draco had been about to say: why should he want other people in the city to find out he had been sleeping with someone like Harry, freeborn and so inconvenient for taking it, unlike a slave, but so strange that Draco hadn't had any idea who he was before tonight?

Harry was glad that he hadn't said it because he wanted to pretend that this fantasy of being desired, of _really _being wanted, was real for a little longer.

"Fine," he said, and laid his head on the ground and closed his eyes as Draco's fingers slid in, and he was stretched as he hadn't been before and hissed as he hadn't done before, and it was all entirely _new_.

* * *

Draco had already had so many new experiences in the Clodia boy's company that he was unsure why this one should take him by surprise.

But it did. The heat inside him. The way the suddenly-appearing oil, a gift from the god like the flowers on Harry's neck, dripped around them, sparking here and there with color as it caught the light of distant fires. The squeaking noise-not even squelching, as Draco would have expected, but _squeaking_-of flesh sliding together. The way that Harry gasped in front of him, and then took a breath and held it.

Draco grunted and gasped back, "Don't do that. You're making it too tight. You're going to hurt yourself."

Why should he care about that? Why should he care about anything but the swirling heat in his blood, lazily extending up and down his limbs, making him gasp and tremble and shut his eyes because it was too _much_?

But he did. And anyway, as he reminded himself with the memory of the last time he'd slept with someone, it was better sex when your partner wasn't crying from the pain.

But this.

This.

He hadn't had any notion that this existed. That Harry existed. That Harry could bring him to moments like this.

_And of course that's the only reason that you're reacting as strongly to this as you are, _said his father's voice in his head, cool as stone, as the urns of their ancestors that he had taken Draco to see once, lined up neatly in shelves in the rock. _This night will end, and you'll regret it because you regret everything that you do outside the rules of the gens._

For once, Draco had something to combat the voice with, though: the tight heat clasping him, and the lazy heat sliding up and down his limbs, courtesy of the god, of the dancing and the chase and the forest that he had run through.

Once he let go, once he decided to fall, then nothing could matter as much as the heat; no one could matter as much as the boy beneath him.

Harry was huffing, trying too obviously to relax his body, his eyelashes fluttering as though he was deciding whether to keep them closed or open. Draco drove forwards and took the choice away from him. Harry's eyes flared open, and Draco captured and held them. They were that green he found so odd, so compelling, the color of the forest around them and the drumbeats that shimmered through the undergrowth, a godly color.

"Look at me," he said.

"I'm doing that, you pisser," Harry said grimly. "What else do you want me to do?"

"This," Draco said, and managed to bend his body far enough that he could kiss Harry on the mouth, feeding him the heat, sharing it, letting it rise again and sweep through him, sweep them away.

Harry didn't realize until that moment how closely he had been bound to the earth, still. He had thought he was letting go, enjoying the moment, instead of worrying about the rumors that it was probable Draco would spread after this encounter.

Now he knew that he hadn't been like that, and he reached up and tangled a hand through Draco's hair for the pleasure of receiving the gift.

He was flying, the way he had been when he sprang through the forest, matched by loping wolves and leaping panthers. His body ached and buzzed. His arms spread wider, wider than he had known they could go, wider than they should be. He gave as good as he got, thrusting back and forth as Draco did, rocking when he couldn't do anything else.

The ground beneath them heated. Harry could feel it as a storm of cinders that flew up and around them; when he looked away from Draco, blue sparks crossed his vision. The forest began to echo to his heartbeat, and trees and hills and roots flickered into and out of existence as he looked at them. Brown and white and gold crisscrossed his face, flickering veils of fire. Harry gasped in and found the fire building in his gut and groin, echoing around and around, making his belly join the aching.

A movement faded beside him.

Harry turned his head and found himself looking at one of the snakes the women had been dancing with, a great serpent, black with bands of gold, studying him with merciless golden eyes. Harry stretched out a hand, because he didn't fear, not right now. This was a creature of the god, and the god was in his blood.

The snake leaned nearer, its tongue flickering out as if it wanted to smell the leaves that rustled and snarled around them in time to their rocking. Its tongue brushed Harry's skin, and a heavy voice spoke in his ears, a hissing voice, a voice that slid across his brain as though the snake had slithered there.

"_You are surprising._"

Before Harry could answer or overcome his own surprise enough to answer back, the snake turned and departed, tail raised high and body coiling in impatient movements.

The snake's vision rocked in his eyes, and vanished, and Harry arched his back and reached orgasm with a sigh that burned through him, while in his ears the drums beat one more time, and slowed, and stopped.

* * *

Draco nearly lost track of the time when he came. So much pleasure had whipped through him, and around his limbs, and about his throat like a strangling vine, that an increase of it was scarcely perceptible.

But he noticed the way he stiffened and pushed forwards, engulfed in hotter heat than the rest, in clenching muscles, and then the way that the impulse to move abandoned him. He sagged forwards, his head falling onto Harry's chest, and he made a small noise of complaint, but was unable to open his eyes or convince his head to rise.

"Draco."

Harry's hand was nudging his cheek. Draco turned his head so that his cheek lay along Harry's chest, beyond the reach of that hand, and stared at him.

Harry's eyes were wide and blown, still the mysterious green color that Draco remembered, but without the god's presence this time. Draco thought they were amazing anyway. Freedom-granting. Life-changing.

For a little while, he had flown free of his father's presence and his father's rules. And the world hadn't crumbled and collapsed. Draco could go back wearing Harry's marks on his skin, and his father would never know what had happened. He would assume that Draco had been with a woman, at worst, and would give only a mild warning about appearing ungraceful in front of someone who might have watched them.

Draco had known that before, of course, which was why he had dared to sneak out to watch the Bacchanalia in the first place, but he hadn't _known _it, it hadn't been stamped and branded on his heart the way it was now. He blinked his head, shook it, and then lightly touched his temple. Yes, his skull was still whole. The new knowledge hadn't shattered him, hadn't broken the bone.

He looked down at Harry. "Was there something you wanted to say?" he asked quietly, smoothing back the wild black hair that had enchanted him so recently.

Harry's eyelids dipped nervously, eyes fluttering beneath them as if he wanted to imitate some of the sillier women Draco had seen in the streets. Then he looked up at Draco and nodded shortly. "I should give you thanks," he said. "It was a new experience, to be wanted for myself and not what someone could make of me."

Draco blinked. He had thought-he hadn't thought about what this experience meant to Harry at all, he realized, at least once Harry gave in, stopped being stupid, and let Draco fuck him. An adventure in a long series of adventures, the way Harry had described his life. Draco hadn't thought it could represent a change for him.

He found himself studying Harry the way he had invited the Clodia boy to study him earlier. Harry frowned and shifted, as if, absurdly, he was embarrassed to find himself lying beneath Draco when they had already seen everything there was to see of one another.

_Not everything, _Draco realized then, reveling in the burn of unfamiliar thoughts through him, thoughts that weren't the same ones about lessons and lineage and government that he'd heard from his father's lips a thousand times before. _I don't know anything about his mind or his life, not really._

An inner voyage. Another adventure. Draco could see it opening up in front of him, and he knew that he could seize it and make it his own if he wanted to-if only Harry didn't decide to go back to the city and pretend that they didn't know each other.

He made the weight of his body heavier when Harry shifted again, apparently ready to withdraw. "Do you know the Via Obliqua?" he murmured. "It runs behind my father's house and around the Fountain of Mercury's Fortune."

Harry's eyebrows bristled like a phalanx's spears. "I know it," he said shortly. "That's the street they chase me down most of the time."

Draco licked at his lips, and that made Harry stare at him in silence, so that Draco could finish the rest of his request. "Then you know the way it bends when it's about to turn around the fountain," he said. "So that no one can see. It's a corner that the old men have been promising they'll do something about for years, but no one has done anything."

"I know," Harry said, and then blinked at Draco in perplexity that made Draco hope he hadn't fucked a mental deficient.

"Then you know that you could meet me there," Draco said. "and no one would see."

Harry looked as though he was about to surge to his feet, but he had forgotten that Draco was lying on top of him. What happened was that he started to surge up, but had to flop back instead. "You're ashamed, then," he said, in a thin, defiant voice. "You don't want anyone to know that you fucked me."

"Weren't _you_ the one who was afraid of that a while ago?" Draco asked, and made his body heavier still. He wasn't amused, not really, but he still felt like laughing as he looked at the indignant expression on Harry's face. "Resolve your contradiction."

"Resolve yours!" Harry tossed his head impatiently. He was shifting back and forth constantly now, his body so lithe and wiry against Draco's that it was starting to stir him back into hardness. "Do you want anyone to know you did this? Is this going to _matter_, outside the woods? Or are you going to walk away because the gens Aemilius is above that?"

"Neither, for right now," Draco said. "I don't know that it will matter. That depends on my will as much as yours."

Again Harry went still, and Draco wondered with a stab of pity that was uncomfortable—because he didn't want to think that anyone he slept with could be pitiable—how little used Harry really was to having his desires and needs acknowledged.

"I—understand," Harry said, though his efforts to imitate an adult tone were laughable. "And you think that we could do something that mattered if I met you there?"

"It's possible," Draco said. "I'm not one to predict all turns of Fortuna's wheel. But we could try." And then he stayed still and looked at Harry expectantly, because he thought he had made enough offers. It was up to Harry to accept or reject them. Draco knew which action he would prefer, but he wasn't about to demean himself by begging.

* * *

Harry wondered what his father would say if he could see him now, and then dismissed that thought with a snort. He knew what Corvinus would say. He would roll his eyes and announce that Harry was a weakling and a disgrace to the gens Clodia, but those insults were nothing new to Harry.

His father's words had lost the power to sting some time ago, Harry realized suddenly, although he had lived in dread of them so long. Perhaps they'd lost it near the beginning of this night.

He looked again at Draco, at that distinctive pale hair and those intense pale eyes, and wondered how long they would get away with this. Liaisons between boys could be discreet, but someone would find out eventually. His father, who seemed to know everything in the city, would.

But. . .

But Harry wanted it anyway. And he had never let popular disapproval prevent him from continuing to exist and taking those things he most wanted, or he would never have come to observe the Bacchanalia in the first place.

"Yes, I'll meet you," he said. "In the corner near the Via Obliqua's turn." He pushed himself away from under Draco and began cleaning himself up as best as he could with handfuls of earth and leaves, wrinkling his nose at the stains on his tunic. Luckily, his father found it easier to just give Harry new tunics than inquire into how Harry might have ruined them.

Draco lay there, watching him with an odd smile on his face. Harry didn't know what it meant, but he no longer thought that he needed to know everything like that.

Things could change. A son of the gens Aemilius was capable of chasing Harry down because he desired him, and fucking him because he wanted him. Harry would have thought otherwise if Draco had been mocking; it was possible to want someone at the time, and then not want them when your desire was fulfilled. Harry had seen lots of women treated like that, which was another reason he had hesitated about letting Draco fuck him.

But he didn't think it had happened here. Draco just lay and watched him, smiling, even uttering a little sigh when Harry had straightened his clothing again and covered himself up. And there would be no reason for him to fake all that just to get Harry's attention. Harry's attention, by itself, wasn't worth anything.

If things didn't work out, then Harry was beginning to wonder if there were other paths that he could take. He remembered the predators running beside him, the snake who had spoken to him.

The feel of the god in his blood.

"Farewell," he told Draco, who bowed his head and went on lying there in the leaves as though he wouldn't get up. Harry hesitated, wondering if he should ask Draco whether he was going back to the city, but that probably _would _get a mocking response. Draco thought he should be smart enough to figure things like that out on his own.

And after a moment, Harry thought he knew the answer. Draco wouldn't walk back with him when they might be seen together.

Only when he turned away did he hear Draco's voice behind him, solemn and intense, not mocking. Perhaps he couldn't be mocking about something like this. "Farewell."

Harry took one step, and then another, and lost himself to the darkness and the beat in his blood that the distant, throbbing drums and the remembrance of what had happened here were still capable of raising in him.

* * *

Draco opened his eyes with a groan. He was never going to drink ghostwine _again_, not if it gave him these odd, darting shadows at the corner of his vision and the even stranger sensation that made him feel as if he _should _have a headache, although he didn't actually have one.

And he was never going to drink in the company of people who weren't Slytherins again, Draco thought with a shudder, as he sat up and brushed at the cobwebs and dirt clinging to his robes. Who _knew _what tricks they might have played on him? It wasn't as though the rest of the school had much reason to be pleased with his House, in the wake of the war.

And he was never going to mention the weird dream he'd had, about watching Roman women dancing in the forest and riding the antlers of a deer and then riding or dancing with Potter, if you wanted to think of it like that.

And he was never going to—

Tell anyone that he had slept next to Harry Potter, he concluded weakly, as his eyes came to rest on the other boy when he turned his head. The other boy whose eyes were already open and looking back at him.

"Er," Potter said. He swallowed hard. Draco moved a bit further away, wondering if he was going to be sick from the ghostwine. Potter was welcome to, as long as he didn't vomit on Draco.

"Did you have—a dream?" Potter asked. "A dream where your clan's name was Aemilius?" He pronounced it oddly, not as fluidly as he had in the dream, a part of Draco that he immediately hated remembered. Potter reached up and felt the side of his head as if he expected to find a lump there.

At this point, Draco would have been _happy_ to find an explanation so simple for their apparently shared dream. He shook his head and started to stand up, feeling as though it would be best for everyone if they both went away without speaking.

But the ghostwine's not-quite-there headache delayed him a moment; he had to lean on the wall to catch his balance and his breath. And that gave Potter the chance to catch up with him.

"Malfoy, wait." Potter was frowning at him now, and he shook his head as though _Malfoy _had become the strange name between now and the last time he'd looked. "That was a dream I had. And I know that you had it, too. It wasn't—I was too much involved in it, it couldn't have been just my dream."

Draco opened his mouth to give a blistering retort, something about how Potter was so self-involved that even his _dreams _had to pull other people into the gravity well he called a personality. But he remembered the feel of Potter beneath him and around him, warm and clasping, and he remembered the way his other self had thought and felt in the dream, as though he had the ability to resist and fight free from his family's traditions if he wanted to, or have everything he wanted as well as them.

The opposite of the way Draco had often felt.

He glanced at Potter, and then away. Those green eyes were so large and _beseeching_, he thought. Potter hadn't needed the Elder Wand. He could have begged the Dark Lord to death.

"I had the dream," Draco said grudgingly. "The same one. Where you were—the outcast, and I was the one whose father was successful and patrician. I don't know what it means," he added suddenly. "It doesn't mean anything."

"Some things about the dream were the same," Potter murmured, which wasn't quite an answer. "And other things were different." He hesitated, and Draco had the distinct impression that he was gathering his courage—which was ridiculous, because when did he lack that quality? Then he reached over and put his hand on Draco's arm.

_Oh._ Draco stared at the hand, his heartbeat slowing. _I reckon that could have needed courage._

"It makes me wonder what else could be different," Potter said, and his eyes were so wide and appealing that it was physically painful.

"Does it?" Draco asked, and he didn't know what to make of his own voice. Encouraging or discouraging? He didn't know. He did know that he put out his hand in return, and Potter promptly clasped it, staring into his face.

"It must make you feel the same," Potter insisted.

"More eloquently, yes," Draco snapped back, because he might put up with some things, but he wasn't about to let Potter misrepresent what he was feeling in clumsy language.

Potter gave him a wide smile, and Draco thought of drums and the quickness of their bodies tangling together on the leaves.

_I can at least see if what feels so good in dreams feels good in reality._

**The End.**


End file.
